This Application is the National Stage filing under 35 U.S.C. § 371 of PCT Application Ser. No. PCT/US12/31304 filed on Mar. 29, 2012. The disclosure of the PCT Application is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Location-based applications are put to many social and tagging uses. Many computing devices have application programming interface (API)—level access that can allow a user to “check-in” and post location, links and content of interest or photos to various location-based services. Many mobile operating systems also allow a program to advertise itself so that users can post to them from other content or programs. For example, a summary feed reader on some smartphones can post any web page or article directly to a social networking application, an online note-taking application, or other applications with just an API call.
Such APIs allow both location and content to be posted to services, with location data being managed based on standards such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards compliant location data. A game can post content through such a channel simply by invoking the sharing API and providing extensible markup language (XML) content, but so far game providers cannot provide meaningful location based data that would allow players to use familiar social networking applications and programs to spot nearby friends or show people where they are in the imaginary world of a game.